Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

Yes you were and a very clear point you have made!

I do think that you and many others may like this!

HITLER: THE ATHEIST (Quiz Show)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP_iNCGH9kY&feature=channel_video_title

I certainly do. They are still with us. They are icons to us. Joan (the Bitch) Collins for example.

The Malleus Maleficarum defines the witch scientifically. And it is a very simple concept.

I think it was thought by some at the time that the behaviour needed to be discouraged in order to make progress or even to survive. There were hordes battering at city gates on all sides.

And there was a powerful temptation to overcome. The rigor of the persecution being driven by the combination of necessity and the difficulty. Augustus had identified the same problem and failed to overcome it by inducements and laws that went unheeded because infractions could not be proven. Hence immigration and the manumission of slaves. Which is an argument we have today with immigration and the granting of citizenship. Whether that's the point where the rot sets in is moot. The cause is the same.

Even Stalin tried it with inducements and that failed too. It was unenforceable and the inducements too costly if they were to be effective.

What a useless education teaches is to hold a view of such matters with the hindsight of how they turned out and to proceed to condemn them on that basis. Like when fm tried to take credit for predicting a football result the day after the game on a thread where the other 28 participants had tried their hand before the game. What ever happened having had a perfectly rational cause is thus no longer a problem to such a view and it can get on with its condemnations on the evidence of how it all turned out. Which you see all around you. Then it is easy to imagine that what you see all around you would be as it is now even if the thing hadn't happened. For a rational determinist whatever happened must be rational because it happened so for one to condemn its results without reference to the cause is having your head up your arse and shoving and shoving and shoving until you turn inside out and look just like before except that you're full of ****.

Not myself caring to be in such a state I search for the rational cause of an event or an incident because I know there was one.

With the witch craze there were many other factors at work. The invention of the printing press for example. The book landed up in all sorts of places where it was perverted for other reasons than the cause it was written to address. For money. A condemned witch's assets were confiscated. Settling scores. Getting rid of nuisances. Umberto Eco covers the real cause in Name of the Rose. But as far as I know there is no evidence that a witch was condemned for the real cause.

The Inquisition condemned one of the two authors of the book. It was the Protestants who really got their teeth into condemning witches. It got to be a form of ethnic cleansing. Burn one Catholic and the rest will flee. Or the other way round when the heat was on.

The book might have been written just to frighten like some of the Fairy Tales are.

Only the definition of witch in that book is the one that can't be argued with.

Hardly scientifically. If it werent for PAul of Tarsus, we wouldnt even have the devil. (The devil was the greatest act of Christian marketing ever)

There were women among the Germanic tribes known as the Volva. I knew about a high ranking Celtic woman called Veleda and knew that no one was certain whether Veleda was a name or title, but Veleda is linguistically related to Volva.

The word Volva means wand carrier. An old Anglo-Saxon term was spaewife.

These women were probably related to Celtic battle goddesses and MacBeth's three weird sisters. Wish I had stumbled upon them earlier. Learning about them changed some long held opinions of mine.

Here we are talking sense and just because spendi, w his head still in a dark orifice, makes stuff up. "Scientifccally defining how to detect witches" INDEEED.

I really think its the drink talking, nobody could be that void of senses.

Yeah, I thought scientifically defining witches was a strange statement but it was sooooo spendi.

Hey, fm, you'll either like this or you will pull out your hair. This is a sentence from a student paper:

"Another study conducted by the philosopher Kiierkegaard (sic) found that video game can lead to juvenile delinquency, fighting at school, and even lead to violent criminal behavior."

I wrote in the margin that Soren Kierkegaard died in 1855.

Well fm--you need to say what the definition is before you can claim that. It is as scientific as reading a thermometer to me. More actually when I think about it.

Are you again hoping that viewers here will be taken in by such baby nonsense.

Tell us the definition and then tell us why it is "hardly scientific". If you please. Just for once old boy. Your assertions are getting seriously tiresome.

Our project got started 1000 years after Paul was turned his toes up. The devil's in the detail. The idea that Paul invented the personification is ludicrous.

And anyway--as I explained--determinists accept whatever has happened as rational. The contemporary logical analysis of the best brains. You jumped forward again to the morning after newspapers. You look at the thermometer and opine that it's getting hotter and tell us that is science!! Holy Moses and butter my toast on both sides.

Yer what?? You're just trying to butter up pom and she can't see the obvious connection between Volva and vulva. Although I will agree it is a very powerful wand. It mesmerised me for a while.

'Soren' is a beautiful name though.

Remember, the students job is to try to test the limits of your knowledge too. I have a friend who is a well known author who came up from a newpaper background. He teaches one writing course a year at a University and has realized that some kids expect that teachers wont even read the kids papers. My friend, coming from a sports writing background , is especially sensitive of the nuances of language and style. He relates several "gotchas" every two weeks when he has his students do an 800 word piece about some subject or another.

We had a friend who owned two llama.
One she named Soren and the other Friederich

There is no connection. One is Latin, the other Germanic. Were one Celtic, it might be closer to Latin, but, neither is.

I hadn't thought about it, but Soren is beautiful.

These kids never know what is going on. I said, "Microcosm of the macrocosm" and flummoxed them. They had never heard the expression.

I also pronounced advertisement as AD-ver-tis-ment and they didn't recognize the word. To them, it is AD-ver-TEYES-ment.

No, it doesnt . Didn't you read it ? A different version was included later, where a story of the creation of women was added .

For banning incest.....really ?

Religions change...arent you one of the ones whinging about how religion is stuck in the past ? Yet here you are criticising what was at the time a modernisation . Make up your mind .

We are the joyous Hitler youth,
We do not need any Christian virtue
Our leader is our savior
The Pope and Rabbi shall be gone
We want to be pagans once again.”

- Song sung by Hitler youth


I'm making a point too....

Predictable ? Oedipus is predictable ? Maybe in your household....Icarus, Minos, Jason, Hercules.....you could have predicted those stories ? WOW ! You are a legend in your own mind .

Is that all you got out of it ? Your imagination isnt excessive by any stretch of the imagination, is it ? Perhaps you have drunk too much over a lifetime to worry about losing it all now .